AusBonsai

A neighbours tree gives me an abundance of Trident seedlings. They get everywere. I even weed some out of my pots without repotting them just chucking them There are just too many for me to care for.
This has brought about a surprise discovery. I have used scorcia in landscaping around our pool and trident seedlings have found a home there. They have grown with practicly no watering, although we have had some decent rain this year the seedlings are growing in what appears to be bone dry pure scorcia on day's that have been in the 30's. The seedlings look healthy and some have grown faster than seedlings I have growing in a more common soil mix. There may be an issue of over crowding though,(maybe I will be forgiven for chucking some out). I have inspected the roots of these seedlings to see what is going on. Most of the roots are in the fine scorcia but they are contained in the pure scorcia by the weed mat. As you can see from the pictures Although they are very dry and I can tell you they have never been fertilised they seem very healthy and vigourous.
I look forward to experimenting with pure scorcia.

Hi soltan,

Thank you for sharing this info. I found it helpful.

Have you considered fusing them together to make a larger trunk in a fairly short times?

Mr. Doug Philips of California has done this quite successfully. His web-site used to be http://www.dugzbonsai.com , but
it is gone now.

Basically he made several metal rings, from large to small etc. He then welded the rings into four or six metal wire
to make something similar to a tree trunk. He then place a large numbers of one year old trident seedlings next to
each others around the this steel frame. And superfeed them.

In 2 to 3 years, they fuse together, and he appears to have a large trident maple.

Regards,

Viet.

I have considerd it but that is as far as I got. Due to a lack of room I don't have that many that are even the size of the wips he used. Thinking again though there is no reason I could not make smaller shohin ones mmm Thanks for the thought
I am glad you liked the post

hey soltan, yes very interesting. tell me does the weed mat form some sort of water table or is it free draining.

I would say niether free draining nor forming a water table. I would say slow draining
I can definatly say that everytime I have checked the roots they appear to be bone dry!

You have a great opportunity to do some experiments with these. I like the idea of fusing some together to produce a shohin. With the nice radial root formation caused by the weed mat you will be able to create an excellent nebari in short time.

Jon